New Gmail Attachments Interface

I was writing an e-mail with some attachments and noticed that Gmail has made some nice tweaks to how attachment uploads are handled. Before, you’d click “add an attachment” which would give a blank form field for filename, and a browse button. Clicking “add another attachment” would give you another blank filename field. Once you hit browse and chose your file the browser would start uploading the attachment in the background. There wasn’t any progress indication though, but you would be able to tell when it was done. Of course, nothing stopped you from hitting send before uploads were done, you’d just have to wait for them to finish before you could move on.

Now, as soon as you hit “add attachment” you get a file browsing box from your OS, without having to click a browse button in Gmail. Once you choose your file, you now get a nice real-time progress bar showing upload progress.

It’s a small change, but I know it will be welcomed by anyone who deals with attachments frequently. Even when I was a bit confused by the changed behavior, the whole operation still felt quicker and simplier. I love small tweaks like this.

[Update] So I was a couple weeks late on this… check out the Official Gmail Blog post for more details, like how you can select more than one file to attach at once now.